In the years I spent earning my master’s degree in conflict transformation in the early 2000s, the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) class I took with Mohammed Abu-Nimer remains a touchstone for me.

The course title was something like “Understanding the Cross-Cultural Aspects of Conflict Transformation.” I don’t remember the names of my required readings, nor do I recall the papers I wrote to earn my three credit hours.

Instead, what I distinctly recall are the conflicts that occurred among the students in the room and how Mohammed – SPI professors are always addressed by their first names – handled them. I can picture my classmates in my mind, seated around a circle of tables in what was normally a light-filled studio for artists. There were 20 of us (evenly males and females) from 12 countries. We looked to be early 20s to late 50s.

Seven of us were some stripe of Christianity, five were Muslim, and one was Buddhist – judging by references made to faith-based values and experiences in class discussions. The remaining seven made no mention of their beliefs. As the week wore on, it became clear that some came from settings of severe persecution promulgated in the name of certain religions.

Our appearances were highly mixed, from an Indian woman in a silk sari to an American man in a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. There was a Middle Eastern woman fully covered in a hijab and jibab – i.e., covered head to toe except for her face – who was sharing a dormitory room with a woman in our class from the same nation. The latter tended to appear in tight clothes that revealed most of her legs and much of her chest. Their distance from each other as roommates was visceral.

One man had issues pertaining to his impending divorce; a woman had issues pertaining to her engagement to be married. A prison official spoke of a grandchild serving time in prison. A middle-aged woman from Asia was sorely missing her young adult children back home and wishing they were with her, while a twenty-something woman from another part of Asia was dreading her return home, where she would be expected to abide by her parents’ wishes in every way.

The question of terrorism arose frequently. Why were radical Muslims targeting innocent Americans in New York City? Why was the U.S. military bombing Muslim civilians overseas?

By Day 4 of the seven allocated for our class, our group felt electric with tension to me. One of the Middle Eastern roommates was openly hostile. Wearing a perpetual half smile, Mohammed was usually on his feet, moving within our circle of tables like a dancing bear considering whether to attack or retreat in the face of threats. Finally he gave a short talk that seemed to be prompted by the behavior of someone from his background (Palestinian-Muslim), but that applied to many of us at that point in the week. This is the gist of what he said:

I’m in this profession, teaching this course, because I believe that it is possible for people holding different beliefs, living in different ways, to learn to live without harming each other, perhaps even cooperating with each other. But this requires that we listen to each other and treat each other with respect. This is what I teach. I hope nobody signed up for this class with a mistaken understanding that I will tolerate disrespect and harm inflicted on others. Now, can we all agree that we will proceed with what we are learning together about each other and about conflict, despite our cross-cultural, cross-religion and cross-gender differences?

The atmosphere in the class shifted. New friendships developed over the next few days, even between the two Middle Eastern women, who chose to remain roommates after all. And I knew I had studied under a maestro of conflict transformation.

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What to do about a world system that rewards greed and views altruism as a personal hobby or (worse) as a weakness? A system in which those wielding power generally “win” by:

• monopolizing resources,
• determining our lifeways
  (not a word in the dictionary, but it serves),
• and overtly or covertly squashing anyone
  in the way of this approach.

These questions played on my mind while studying for my CJP master’s degree, 2001-04. I voiced them in the 2004 book Critical Issues in Restorative Justice, in which I titled my chapter “Does Restorative Justice Challenge Systemic Injustices?” I discussed how restorative justice fails to turn off the spigot that floods the prison system with the perpetrators of one-on-one crimes. I pointed out that large-scale crimes are often not even defined as such:

I am referring to the relatively faceless crimes of ruining people’s pension plans in the name of greed for a few, of forcing the public to pay unnecessarily high prices (as in the case of Microsoft’s monopoly on the Windows operating system), and of finding other ways to work the system to accumulate far more wealth than anyone can possibly need while others are suffering from want.

The book editors, Howard Zehr and Barb Toews, weren’t entirely happy with my chapter. Howard asked me for my answer to the dilemma I pointed out, and I told him I had none. I ended up writing mushily:

At least some of us need to move beyond restorative justice concepts into educating ourselves in the workings of the corporate economy. Our aim… should be to develop a more just social order while preserving the good parts – especially the dynamism – of today’s economic system… Moving with cautious urgency – that is, with urgent consciousness that suffering and permanent damage are occurring now, but with cautious knowledge that ill-considered change may be worse than no change at all – we need to launch a worldwide discussion on what is the best possible socioeconomic system and how to get to it.

This year, 11 years after writing that chapter and 10 years after I produced the inaugural issue of Peacebuilder, I am ending my role as editor-in-chief at EMU to pursue a better answer than the one I offered above.

Of course, I’m not alone in hungering for a more just social order. Many of those interviewed for this issue of Peacebuilder alluded to their desire to address the “systemic” or “structural” roots of violent conflict. They expressed hope that their incremental grassroots efforts, one-on-one relationship-building, and policy consultations with world bodies would eventually yield the structural shifts they’d like to see.

Like me, many of my fellow graduates of CJP fret over the consequences of our current global system, as it foments a massive trade in war weapons, the crushing of indigenous cultures, tidal waves of economic and political refugees, environmental catastrophes, and wealth concentrated in the hands of 1% of the world’s population. But nobody has clarity on a better system, much less how to bring it into being.

I don’t see myself as an original thinker, but rather as someone who is willing to spend years pulling strands of thought from here, others from there and yonder, and (inshallah) to one day weave an attractively fresh paradigm. One thing is for sure: it’ll be entirely different from the one that Ayn Rand popularized with her books – namely, “the virtue of selfishness,” the glorification of winner-take-all scenarios, and the inherent morality of unregulated capitalism.

I’d like to stay in touch with as many from the CJP community as possible and, in the years ahead, to get your feedback for my lines of thought as they slowly evolve. To locate me, try LinkedIn, Facebook, or email bonnie.lofton@gmail.com. (As for leaving my current role, there’s a splendid editor, Lauren Jefferson, taking my place!)

— Bonnie Price Lofton

,��PhD in Social Work 2008, Osmania University in Hyderabad, India.��Dissertation title: “A Study of the Quality of Life of Sri Lankan Refugees Living in Camps in Tamil Nadu.” Current work: Chief Zonal Officer in CASA (Church’s Auxiliary for Social Action). “We work in the villages of India. I coordinate development efforts in the four southern states of India. Our focus is on poverty alleviation and political awareness and empowerment of the oppressed classes, particularly the dalits, tribals, women and backward castes.”

,��PhD in Theology 2005, University of Durham in the United Kingdom.��Dissertation title: “Corporate Discipline and the People of God: A Study of 1 Corinthians 5.3-5.” Current work: College and seminary professor of religion and a mediator in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Previously Brenneman was an assistant professor of religion and the director of peace and conflict studies at Mennonite-affiliated Bluffton University in Ohio. “My dissertation was a study of community discipline in the ancient church in Corinth, with implications for churches today.”

,��PhD in Peace Studies 2008 from the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.��Dissertation title: “A Transformative Approach to Public Dispute Resolution: A Study of the U.S. Model and the South Korean Case.” Current work: Education and publication, including book writing, focusing on��peacebuilding and conflict transformation; lecturer at universities,��special events and��workshops for different groups. “I published a book titled Conflict Resolution in Korean Society in 2010. I also translated a book entitled Managing Public Disputes. Both books are my efforts to introduce conflict resolution/transformation to Korean society and encourage people to take different approaches to conflict based on dialogue and collaboration.”

,��PhD in Political Science 2004 from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India.��Thesis title: “Refugee Problematic and Regional Security in South Asia.” Current work: Assistant professor in the ��in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Kaushikee’s online curriculum vitae list dozens of seminars given, workshops led, conferences organized, and papers, monographs and a book published, both in India and in other countries, notably the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United States. Her range of interests is wide—from human rights to conflict resolution—but she has demonstrated a particular interest in the Gandhian approach to peace and conflict resolution.

,��Doctor of Letters (D.LItt.) 2012, Drew University in New Jersey.��Dissertation title: “On the Survival of Mennonite Community in Modern-Day America: Lessons from History, Communities and Artists.” Current work: Editor-in-chief at ��ݮ����, including writing and editing Peacebuilder magazine. “The Mennonite church-community offers the world a distinctive and much-needed minority voice on behalf of living peacefully and helping people who are suffering. I hope this community will resist the historic trend of the assimilation of minority communities into the dominant culture.”

,��PhD in Conflict Analysis and Resolution 2010 from the School for Conflict Analysis & Resolution at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.��Dissertation title: “The Politics Of Ritual:��Exploring Discourse Regarding The Use Of Ritual In Northern Uganda.” Current work: Chief of Programming and Training for Africa Region of the United States Peace Corps. “In this role I provide strategic oversight and guidance to the development efforts of 25 country programs in Africa.�� It is the largest regional program in the Peace Corps—approximately 41 percent of Peace Corps Volunteers serve in Africa.��Though not the largest part of what I do, I have started a post-conflict support initiative for our programs in Rwanda, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Liberia.”

PLUS:��Three female graduates earned doctoral-level law degrees before enrolling in CJP: , Doctor of Law 1988 from the Catholic University in Quito, Ecuador; , JD 1988 from George Washington University School of Law; and , JD 1987 from West Virginia University School of Law.

Sometimes one wishes that our experts in peacebuilding at ��ݮ���� (EMU) had called it wrong. One wishes that they had been mistaken in believing that a large-scale U.S.-initiated military response to the tragedy of September 11, 2011, would have serious global repercussions, worsening the destructive impact of the 9/11 attack rather than easing it.

But if you go back and read their , you will see that EMU’s conflict transformation professors— , Ron Kraybill, , , , , Nancy Good, and , along with others��— offered well-reasoned pleas to take a deep breath and to choose a truly restorative path after this tragedy.

They asked their fellow citizens and national leaders to step away from the natural, but ultimately destructive, instinct to strike back at the perpetrators. These professors of peacebuilding explained that such a reaction would feed the cycle of vengeance, cost us friends around the world, result in exponentially more deaths than those killed in the attacks, and actually play into the hands of the terrorists.

Five days after the attack, John Paul Lederach wrote: “The biggest blow we can serve terror is to make it irrelevant. The worst thing we could do is to feed it unintentionally by making it and its leaders the center stage of what we do. Let’s choose democracy and reconciliation over revenge and destruction. Let’s to do exactly what they do not expect.”

In a local op-ed piece, Ron Kraybill further elaborated: “Massive retaliation by U.S. armed forces is precisely the response most sought by terrorists. After all, terrorist organizations are relatively small and weak, and a primary goal is publicity and recruitment of new supporters. Their best hope is to provoke a reaction that earns new enemies for us and new sympathizers for the terrorists.”

Jayne Docherty asked that the U.S. “examine and address the conditions and policies that have given rise to the cycles of unrest, violence, and terror that have been escalating around the world.”

Nancy Good, who did her doctorate on psychosocial trauma, wrote: “We can’t transform the presenting conflict without uncovering—or somehow attending to—the underlying trauma. The conflict can actually worsen. Victims are re-traumatized and, if the trauma goes unhealed, the victim may become the aggressor; the abused may become the abuser.”

Though Good did not write about this at the time, her message on unhealed trauma is now pertinent to U.S. veterans who are returning, after multiple deployments, with not only physical wounds, but psychological ones.

Kraybill worried that “over confidence in the effectiveness of superior conventional force makes it relatively easy for states to be enticed into costly mobilization.” If, as a result, “heavy damage is inflicted on civilian populations, the civilian support base for the ‘unconventional’ group will be exponentially expanded.” (Kraybill’s fears were realized in both Afghanistan and Iraq, though General Patraeus earned wide praised for trying to reverse this tide.)

On the first anniversary of 9/11, Kraybill wrote of grieving over “the billions we have wasted on weapons, when true long-term security requires investments of a different kind.” Those “billions” quickly became tens of billions, and then hundreds of billions of dollars, spent on warfare and its attendant costs. (For fiscal years 2001 through 2007, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the U.S. ��spent $602 billion on operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other regions linked to the “war on terrorism,” as well as on veterans’ benefits and services.) Budget experts now speak in terms of trillions of dollars.

It is not a coincidence, unfortunately, that these massive expenditures have helped fuel one of the worst economic recessions in the history of this country—a recession that has sickened much of the world and rendered it less able to deal with other issues that affect life on earth, such as global climate change.

Though Osama bin Laden is dead, his aim of severely crippling the United States and other perceived enemies lives on.

Let me be clear: none of the EMU-based experts were arguing to do nothing to address the attacks of 9/11. On the contrary, they were arguing in favor of more effective, more collaborative, less costly, and less self-harmful steps to clean up the soil in which terrorism thrives and to ensure that terrorist groups attract a dwindling number of followers.

Writing in a recent Christian Century (8/11/11, on Peacebuilder Online), John Paul Lederach reflected on the decade since 9/11. He noted that many U.S. citizens were led to believe that the world was divided into “us and them.”

“This was particularly true of how we understood and engaged the Muslim world, at home and abroad,” he said. “We spent our national wealth on war and isolating our enemies.”

In contrast, Lederach said the events of the past decade caused him to feel renewed affinity for Jesus’ admonition to befriend the enemy: “We find this in Jesus’ response to people who his closest disciples found unacceptable. He ate with his enemies. He went to their houses and he invited them in.

“None of this implied that he changed his fundamental beliefs or values,” wrote Lederach. “It implied that he reached out and built relationships with those deemed untouchable and a threat. He chose love over fear, engagement over isolation and separation.”

As an example of the possibilities of such relationship-building, Lederach cited the hundreds of Muslims who have gathered with Christians and people of other faiths from all over the world at EMU’s since its founding in the mid 1990s. Almost all of these people have returned to their homes, buoyed by new friendships, by new skills for working in their contexts for peace, and by hope for a world where everyone first reaches for the tools of non-violent conflict transformation, rather than for weapons that will further traumatize us all.

[ (MA ’04) is editor in chief for ��ݮ����’s Crossoads��and Peacebuilder magazines.]